Design of a Multipurpose Whitebox Networking Platform

This paper presents a prototype implementation ofa multipurpose network platform which could be easily adaptedto accommodate various types of future networks. Our design ismotivated by the objective to overcome the drawbacks ofexisting whitebox networking devices in flexibility andperformance points of view. Instead of relying on two extremeends; ASIC or general purpose CPU, we propose amultipurpose platform which combines the moderate flexibilityand rich features for fast packet processing ofhigh-performance network processor, and almost the sameflexibility as a general purpose CPU and the offloadingfunctions such as security and deep packet inspection ofmulticore processor. We also show how we could use themultipurpose platform as a router with deep packet inspectionfeature by running an open source routing suite as controlfunction, and provide some performance numbers for thesystem.